Early ARM 64-bit prototype servers could come by year end

Early prototype 64-bit ARM servers could be available for testing purposes by the end of this year or possibly at the latest by the middle of next year, ARM said on Monday.

But ARM also realizes it won't unseat Intel overnight in the server market.

"We've set a modest expectation of market share in 2014. We've said a percent or two," Ferguson said. "We're not going to suddenly from nothing to twenty percent or anything like that."

ARM is also laying out tools to promote software development for its 64-bit instruction set. The company released a 64-bit Linux distribution a month ago with support for the ARMv8 instruction set, and the OS is being repurposed and picked up for major Linux distributions, Ferguson said.

The company is also talking to hosting providers to run ARM servers, and some cloud implementations are being tested on ARM processors via hosting provider Rackspace. The servers run the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP software) stack. OpenStack and Hadoop have also been optimized for the server.